


kagura by night

by seventhstar



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Asexual Okuwaka Minako, Canon Compliant, Character Study, Female-Centric, Gen, Immortal Okukawa Minako, Japanese Culture, Other, aromantic Okukawa Minako, dance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-08
Updated: 2019-04-08
Packaged: 2020-01-07 01:56:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,009
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18400799
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seventhstar/pseuds/seventhstar
Summary: The world around her is like the mountains.A mortal lifespan is narrow; mortals watch the mountain’s unchanging faces, unravaged by the same measure of time that takes a human from dust to dust, and think them immortal in comparison. But stone erodes, just as flesh decays. It just takes longer.If she watches long enough, everything changes. Languages drift until all the words she learned before are meaningless. Technology changes until she ceases to believe in magic because human ingenuity is more infinite than the stars. What is beautiful, what is polite, what is wrong, what is right—time, given its way, reshapes all.But Minako’s body remains as it has always been. That’s why she loves to dance, she supposes; it’s the one thing time cannot take from her.





	kagura by night

_There used be a village by the sea where an immortal woman lived. The people of that town pitied her; they said she had lost a lover, and was too heartbroken to die._

 

* * *

 

The world around her is like the mountains.

A mortal lifespan is narrow; mortals watch the mountain’s unchanging faces, unravaged by the same measure of time that takes a human from dust to dust, and think them immortal in comparison. But stone erodes, just as flesh decays. It just takes longer.

If she watches long enough, everything changes. Languages drift until all the words she learned before are meaningless. Technology changes until she ceases to believe in magic because human ingenuity is more infinite than the stars. What is beautiful, what is polite, what is wrong, what is right—time, given its way, reshapes all.

But Minako’s body remains as it has always been. That’s why she loves to dance, she supposes; it’s the one thing time cannot take from her.

 

* * *

 

Lilia Baranovskaya hunts her down on a wintery Russian morning. Even as a child, she has the lean look of a predator; Minako half-expects her to pounce when a mouse runs past her foot on the floor. _Teach me,_ she says. Minako can see the shape of a prima ballerina in the proud set of her mouth, in her ramrod posture.

 

 

(Decades later, Minako will see Yuri Plisetsky skate at the Cup of China and know.)

 

* * *

 

In 1543, Minako leaves Japan for the first time. She steals aboard a Portuguese ship—later the same ship’s cargo will be herenslaved countrymen—and arrives, weak with hunger and illness, on the shores of Portugal. She has nothing but the clothes on her back and a working knowledge of Portuguese. Her skill with languages is born of necessity, rather than talent, but it serves her as well in Portugal as it has in Japan over centuries of linguistic drift.

In Portugal every region has its own dance, and she drifts from place to place, looking for the one that will make her want to stay. The long passage from Japan has made the world enormous to her; she can’t fathom settling anywhere, not when the width and breadth of her experience is still so small.

_Where are you going alone?_

_Everywhere,_ Minako always says.

 

* * *

 

Takeshi Nishigori is a terrible dancer.

He asks her for a job; Minako doesn’t need help, but she tells him she’ll hire him. He teaches dance beside her, swallowing down his frustration with the more rambunctious children, glaring at the bottle of sake Minako drinks from while he tends bar. Minako doesn’t let Takeshi drink while he’s working.

Despite the anger, he learns how to coax the children into obeying. Despite the long, tedious nights at the bar, he learns patience. Minako fires him a month before Yuuko is due, pressing more money than he’s owed into his hands.

They offer to make her godmother. She refuses. _Just bring them by when they’re old enough to dance,_ she tells them. _I’ve got too few students as it is._

 

* * *

 

_There used to be a town by the sea where an immortal woman lived. The people of that town feared her; they said she had lost a child, and might steal theirs for her own._

 

* * *

 

From Portugal she travels to Spain, fleeing the war for Portuguese independence, and from Spain she finds herself in France.

In 1653, Minako sees _Le Ballet de La Nuit._ The performance will be famous, later, for giving the current king of France his moniker, _The Sun King._ Minako will remember it, too—she falls in love with ballet that day, and her heart, given away, never comes back.

 

* * *

 

_Aren’t you tired of being alone?_

Minako still remembers the first dances, the kagura, back when she was a descendant of Ame-no-Uzume. (And Minako is immortal, so perhaps she is.) She remembers that she taught the dances to girls who taught them to their daughters who taught them to their daughters until there were as many folk dances as there were villages. Minako’s branches have born a thousand different fruits. She still dances, alone, when the time of the harvest comes. She made peace with the transience of everything long ago.

All of Japan dances in the shadow Minako cast. She is in every step, every snap of a fan; she is never alone.

 

* * *

 

_Minako-sensei, do you think I’ll ever be as good as you?_

It’s late at night; other children are home with their families or out with their friends, eating dinner and watching movies. Yuuri dances, barefoot in the studio, Apollo in _Le Ballet de la Nuit,_ so beautifully that Versailles is reborn in his wake.

She cries when he runs off to Detroit to be a skater. But she cries when he wins gold, too.

 _This is my ballet instructor, Minako-sensei,_ Yuuri tells anyone who asks. He pronounces ‘ballet instructor’ with all the gravity of a peasant introducing a queen.

He and Viktor dance at their wedding. Minako sits back, mourns the way the students inevitably become the masters, burns up with pride.

 _You always were, kid,_ she thinks.

 

 

 

 

(Twelve years from now Yuuri will see Axel Nishigori skate and know.)

 

* * *

 

There is a town by the sea where an immortal woman lives. The people of that town neither pity nor fear her; they come to her bar to drink and bring their children to her studio to learn dance.

Someday Minako will go away again, and when she comes back, everything but the color of the water will have changed. They will tell new stories about the immortal woman who dwells among them; they will make her a mother or wife or temptress, because those are the shapes of women they understand.

The scar stamped into the earth by thousands of dancing feet is Minako’s legacy. The steps might change from year to year; the music might never sound the same. But her love, as a dancer for dance, as a teacher for students, remains, unlike the mountains, uneroded.


End file.
